news

Tuesday various

  • Mother Jones on the death of literary magazines. To which my short answer is: same as it ever was, same as it ever was. I think there’s an argument to made that readership is down, but I don’t think that’s reflected in the number of different venues for writers. Some literary magazines will die off, or will be forced to adopt new business models — pay even less, change what they publish — but it seems like not a day goes by when another new magazine or journal doesn’t open up. [via]
  • How to make a Michael Cera movie [via]
  • Are there oceans of liquid diamond on Uranus and Neptune? [via]
  • I’m amused that somebody thinks “man listens to loud music and neighbors complain” is somehow more newsworthy because the loud music was John Denver.
  • And finally, I like this mashup of 2009’s top songs a whole lot more than the individual songs it’s made up of.

Falling Man

Now I’m calling all citizens from all over the world
This is Captain America calling
I bailed you out when you were down on your knees
So will you catch me now I’m falling — The Kinks, “Catch Me Now I’m Falling”

It’s not like I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about September 11. We live in a world so permeated by what happened that day — and moreover by the less fortunate aftershocks — that not thinking about it is all but impossible. (Though even Rudy “a Noun, a Verb, 9/11” Giuliani seems to be trying.) It’s just that I haven’t gone out of my way to relive those events, the way it felt that morning and in the immediate aftermath. I haven’t watched the documentaries or the interviews with survivors, or read any of the countless books written about the attacks. (The closest I’ve come is recently watching Spike Lee’s masterful 25th Hour, in which, as Roger Ebert notes, “the shadow of 9/11 hangs over [everything].”) I haven’t avoided it, but it occurs to me I also haven’t sought it out.

I wasn’t in New York at the time. In fact, it wasn’t until after noon that I learned that anything had happened. I wandered into a now defunct arcade in downtown State College, PA, and heard about the attacks on the radio. In retrospect, it seems incredible that I remained unaware for those first few hours, especially since the rest of the day was spent in frantic phone calls and watching the news. I remember being overwhelmed by it all, not knowing what to say or how to say it, and being just blindsided with grief*.

It’s maybe no wonder that I’ve avoided those movies and books.

Still, last week I read (and I’d say largely enjoyed) Don DeLillo’s 2007 book Falling Man, which right off the bat throws you back into that bright September morning:

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under the cars.

The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.

The “he” there is Keith Neudecker, and the rest of the story plays out over the next few years against the backdrop of his estranged marriage to Lianne. It’s in many respects a modest, day-to-day domestic drama, and I think it bothered some critics — notably Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times — that it wasn’t a more ambitious, more definitive 9/11 book. But is such a thing even possible? That day, and more importantly our fumbling and failed attempts to make sense of it, are never far from the center of DeLillo’s book. It’s not as panoramic or expansive as his novel Underworld, it’s true, but I think the sheer enormity and immediacy of the 9/11 attacks would make that kind of book difficult to write, much less read.

So this isn’t the definitive book on the subject, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t full of some terrific writing:

She wanted to disbelieve. She was an infidel in current geopolitical parlance. She remembered how her father, how Jack’s face went bright and hot, appearing to buzz with electric current after a day in the sun. Look around us, out there, up there, ocean, sky, night, and she thought about this, over coffee and toast, how he believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light. Jack was an architect, an artist, a sad man, she thought, for much of his life, and it was the kind of sadness that yearns for something intangible and vast, the one solace that might dissolve his paltry misfortune.

I think my pleasure in the book came precisely because it isn’t the definitive book on the subject, because instead of trying to make sense of it all, it simply lets us watch others trying to make sense of it all. And that, in the end, may be the best any of us can do.

* None of it personal, thankfully. None of the family or friends I had in New York were at the World Trade Center that morning.

The Wednesdayness of it all

I didn’t know this until today, and I wish I hadn’t found it out under such terrible circumstances, but the Haitian Consul of New York is directly next to the building where I work. There were local news vans parked all down our stretch of Madison Avenue this evening, setting up shop, conducting interviews. My heart (and, if I could, more money) goes out to the survivors of yesterday’s terrible earthquake.

In other news…well, there isn’t much other news. I had alphabet soup for lunch this afternoon, which isn’t especially exciting or noteworthy, but I enjoyed it, and it was a coworker’s birthday, so we had cookies and cake later in the day. I’m attending a conference at the Waldorf Astoria tomorrow, which should at least break up some of the monotony. And that’s about it. It’s been a decent but very uneventful week for me.

Right now, I’m just watching an episode of Monty Python. I own the boxed set, so I’ve decided to go through and watch them all again. For somebody who calls himself a Python fan, I think there’s a significant handful I’ve actually never seen. (Truth be told, it was the records and then the movies where I first fell in love with the show, back in junior high. I never saw a single episode until college.) It seemed high time I remedied that.

Wednesday various

  • I don’t know…when the bank seizes the wrong house, changes the locks, tacks a foreclosure notice to the door, and leaves 75 pounds of fish to rot for a week, do you really think the homeowner’s suit has no merit? If nothing else, he should press charges for breaking and entering. [via]
  • I’m just a little late to this, but: the Guardian considers the worst books of the last decade:

    To remember only achievement and worth is to ignore the vast majority of our cultural experience. It helps create that strange cultural telescoping that makes us think that the past was always better; that odd warping of collective memory that enables us to recall even the 1970s fondly.

    There’s some truth to this, I think. Of course, I do like at least a couple of the books he mentions as worst of the decade. (Oracle Night does approach self-parody, but it’s the last time I truly enjoyed Auster, and I found it a genuinely haunting book. His Man in the Dark, ostensibly about the past decade, was much, much worse.) [via]

  • Jonathan Lethem: “Ian McEwan has a great line where he says, ‘Book touring is like being an employee of your former self.'”

  • NPR looks at The Big Bang Theory and the male gaze:

    But the changes in this particular show make for a great example of the fact that you don’t just avoid empty, cliched versions of women (or men, and I am looking at you, Sex And The City) because they’re offensive or infuriating or anything like that. The best creative reason to avoid them is that they make your show bad. Making Penny real has opened up all kinds of comedic possibilities that haven’t transformed it into life-changing art, but have made it into a very good half-hour sitcom… [via]

    I started watching the show over my holiday break for the first time, and I’ve very quickly caught up. (I watched this week’s episode last night.) I liked the first season (and even the pilot) considerably more than Linda Holmes did, but she’s not at all wrong about Penny. What makes the show work is that these are very real, well developed characters, and it suffered when she alone wasn’t.

  • And finally, for the couple of Doctor Who fans in the audience, John Seavey offers a reconsideration of the Fifth Doctor.